Conversational Internalism
João Miranda (University of Lisbon, LanCog)

29 April 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET) | Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Access internalism is the view that only items that one is aware of are available to justify beliefs. Conversational internalism, the view to be defended in this paper, is the kind of access internalism that argues that the reason why access is required, is not because it is in itself epistemologically relevant, but because it is necessary for conversations. Internal access gets its epistemological relevance from conversations because the ability to adequately intervene in conversations is what is required to make a belief justified, and you can’t adequately intervene in a conversation without being aware of what you’re conversing. I start by distinguishing internalistic from externalistic approaches to epistemology, setting the stage for the discussion. I then present my theory, and an argument for it. Characterizing conversations – the relevant kind of conversations – as things that can be represented as sequences of ordered pairs Question→Answer, allows for contrastivism (Snedegar, 2017) to provide an explanation of how a belief can get justified through conversation and contextualism about justification (inspired by Lewis, 1996) to provide a more refined view of how the theory can account for shifts in the strength of justificatory demands from one conversation to another. I conclude by showing how the theory handles some main objections to internalism (such as those that concern an agent’s capacity to store enough reasons and the strength of the epistemological demands for justification), in particular by arguing that it fares better against those objections than traditional internalistic alternatives.

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